The government says the spelling mistakes on the school vouchers distributed these days are the fault of the "subcontracted company" and that it "will not reprint them." Let's review them, first of all. There's one that I'd like to believe is a typo. Comergos by shops. Although on the keyboard the G is very far from the Ç. The second one also seems typographical. Where it should say adhered says acherits. C and D are close. The other two are major errors. Exchanges by Redeem them. Here the author doesn't understand anything about the language he's writing in. He doesn't understand that a pronoun exists. And we also find a you will find which should have an accent: you will find. That mistake is incomprehensible. No proofreader can overlook any of these four botched jobs, unless, of course, they're not a philologist or a Catalan speaker. On a computer, any robot can underline these words for you.

The families of all primary and secondary school students in public and private schools are receiving two 30-euro vouchers in the mail these days to purchase school supplies. The surprise was that they contain glaring spelling mistakes (such as, exchange them without apostrophizing and you will find without accent) and typos (shops instead of shops and acherits instead of attached). The Government has stated that the error is the fault of the subcontracted company and rules out reprinting them

Now it's time. After years of proposals and drafts, this Wednesday more than 44,000 students across Catalonia will be taking the new selectivity model for the first time. These new PAU exams aim to be more competency-based—and therefore less rote—and have already generated controversy before they even begin.

The anecdote, which I know firsthand, is strictly true. In the mid-1960s, historian Jordi Nadal, professor of economic history at the University of Barcelona, ​​failed a student because, on the exam, she had written foreign with g. Nowadays, a student in the Faculty of Economics failing an exam due to a spelling mistake would seem exaggerated and might even provoke a minor scandal. The question, naturally, is why? Why can't every university student be required to write correctly? Why do some people argue that spelling rules aren't that important? The answer is that spelling is merely a symptom, a manifestation, of something much deeper and more transcendent: mastery of the language, which includes grammar and vocabulary, and spelling, of course.

When Euclid introduced his people Items, one of the great intellectual constructions of humanity, to Ptolemy I, King of Egypt, the response he received was: "Are there no smoother roads to geometry?" "No, there are no royal roads to mathematics," Euclid retorted.

Finally, spelling mistakes will deduct points on university entrance exams where writing is a major focus. The Catalan government has backtracked on a fiasco that had simultaneously generated alarm and confusion among students, teachers, and families. The Department of Universities announced on Wednesday that spelling would only deduct points on language and literature exams, but the following day, Thursday, following a public reaction, they quickly hid behind confusion and went back to square one. With less than a week until the university entrance exams, such a spectacle is lamentable. So, from the outset, the ones who fail are the university entrance exam itself: those responsible for its organization. A mistake like this does nothing to enhance the prestige of the exam and, above all, creates insecurity among both students and examiners.

Regardless of the Government's last-minute rectificationThe resignation of the educational system due to spelling mistakes says many things about us, and none of them good. The first is the dramatic decline in academic standards, which is the extension of parents' padding of children at school, and the inability to find a balance between students' emotional well-being and the effort they must make to learn. Young children are eager to learn and will find the level of spelling proficiency that adults consider normal.

Sounds perfect to me. In PAZ, there is war. The proofreaders (called "proofreaders" by the corresponding department) will deduct 0.1 points for spelling mistakes on the exams. Catalan, Spanish, and literature. With a limit, eh? 2 points. In foreign languages, up to 10% of the exercise will be deducted from written expression if the student is poor. In the remaining subjects, it seems that students will finally be penalized for spelling. We return, then, to what was said in October: that "coherence, grammatical and spelling accuracy, and the presentation of texts will be assessed, the discount of which can reach 10% of the total grade."

How lucky we are, Catalans. The Catalan government sends high schools the criteria for marking Catalan exams for the second year of compulsory secondary education. In the text, by the way, it mentions "correctors," I suppose to avoid using the generic masculine ("correctors should not use the model to seek perfection in the answer..."), which is good, because it distinguishes them from "correction machines." We read that, among the criteria, "spelling errors should not be taken into account unless they seriously hinder the meaning of the answer." Manolo, come on.